the shot that rises into the sky and floats against the landscape, the forty-foot putt that sinks." Beyond question, the swing analyzer is high core. "Twenty cameras in an arc of a hundred and eighty degrees are filming simultaneously, contributing to a composite, slow-motion, three- dimensional image," Jerris said. "Busi- ness people run in, run up to get their swing analyzed." They take home a DVD and study it superposed on Tiger's swing. The thirteen U.S.G.A. champi- onship trophies stand nearby, the oldest being the Women's Amateur (1896), fully four feet tall and bossed with jew- els. Original men's trophies have had a way of melting in fires. Champions can buy replicas of trophies they win, but the real things are on their way to the Russian Tea Room, like the 1-iron that Ben Hogan used in his miraculous re- turn from a crushing highway injury to win the 1950 Open at Merion, and Bobby Jones's hickory-shafted goose- neck putter Calamity Jane, two of the three most hallowed golf clubs in the U.S.G.A.'s collection of six thousand. On the seventy-second hole at Mer- ion, Hogan-exhausted and still un- steady on his recuperating legs-hit such a storybook shot with the 1-iron that a number of touring professionals later gathered at the spot to see who could do the same. No one could do the same. None of them even hit the green. As Hogan and his caddy had moved on up the fairway after the shot, the unroped gallery closed in around them, and the 1-iron disappeared from Hogan's bag. Thirty-three years later, it turned up in an East Coast pro shop, and was tentatively identified after a dealer noticed that balls had been hit so consistently on the 1-iron's exact sweet spot-more than halfway back on the face of the club-that a half-inch dot had been etched in the metal. The club was mailed to Hogan in Texas, who confinned its authenticity, and gave it to the U.S.G.A. Bobby Jones won his Grand Slam with Calamity Jane, and so many additional tournaments that his bright medals- arranged in Far Hills in annual rows, as they will be on Fifty-seventh Street- resemble a winning card at Bingo. When Apollo 14 went to the moon, II /.......--"'"V'C l - =-- .....- ---..... '-- \ (1 m JÞ .=-- J . ( I; I ' / A it -.,../ f --:s:x - ....Jç -= - Ii (u i' () - í l WE HONoR. AL-L ' tv\A OR CREDIT CARDS r - - B1 Md most C3 12 'ETARY EEl ""'- d -= RESTRICTiONS (/ - '(; r' _ fi 1 / ---- - - r ø \ Ø //J i -"...-? - Bv {m IlcY'- in 1971, it carried a rock-and-soil- sampling tool that had a barrel grip and a cylindrical shaft three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Aluminum with Tef- lon O-rings, it was thirty-three inches long and consisted of six parts that could fit into one another to make the one shaft. Unbeknownst to NASA, the U.S. Navy astronaut Alan Shepard and a guy in the NASA machine shop took the head off a 6-iron and modified its hosel with a hexagonal fitting that would lock into one end of the sampler's handle. Shepard put the club head in a white athletic sock with two golf balls, concealed the package down one leg of his space suit, blasted off the big tee in Florida, and headed for the first at Lu- narrama. After completing his duties up there, he assembled the golf club and pulled one of the balls out of the sock. Speaking on live television to the popu- lation of the planet he had left behind, and sounding just slightly like a barker in a sideshow, he said, "In my left hand I have a little white pellet familiar to millions of Americans." He said, "I'm going to try a little sand-trap shot here," and, like most golfers who routinely shoot bogey rounds, he offered an ex- cuse beforehand: the space suit was in- conveniently bulky-"I can't do it with two hands." He swung with one hand, four times. He whiffed. He nudged a ball a few feet. He shanked into a crater. And on his fourth swing he clocked one three hundred yards. The length of the shot was less impressive to Shepard than the length of time it remained aloft- about thirty-five seconds (versus six for a long drive on Earth). He left the two golf balls on the moon but brought the club back with him, and three years later gave it to the U.S.G.A. The Shepard moon club at the Smithsonian Institu- tion's Air & Space Museum in Wash- ington is a replica. J erris refers to that O-ringed 6-iron as "the most important golf club in his- tory." Whatever you and your friend Jack Nicklaus might make of that, surely you will find it in the Tea Room in a central location. Level to level, you are always drawn first to the center of things, and then, "if the subject matter interests you, you move toward areas of the floor which are detail-rich and artifact-hea " And there, for example, you will find the feathe The history of